‘I do not want to be good,’ declared Martha Gellhorn. ‘I wish to be hell on wheels, or dead.’ Gellhorn is one of Sara Wheeler’s heroines, and something of these feisty and defiant sentiments runs through her memoir, which is both very enjoyable and impressive. Wheeler is remarkable for the sheer amount of travelling she has done over the last forty years, often to inhospitable places. She has structured this, her tenth book, to bring in what she calls the best bits of journeys – the funny, absurd, revealing moments – left out of earlier accounts, while also weaving in thoughts about what it has been like to be a woman travelling on her own through a rapidly changing planet.

Wheeler grew up in Bristol, where most of her family worked at the Wills tobacco factory. It was the 1960s, the family television was black and white, there were still lavatories in the gardens, ‘abroad’ was distinctly suspicious and racism was rampant. The first in her family to continue education beyond the age of sixteen, she won a scholarship to read ancient Greek at Oxford, where she was told that ‘women aren’t suited to epic poetry’.

And then she set forth, ‘to dilute the people among whom I had grown up’. The 1970s marked the start of a golden age for travellers, but not many of them were yet women. Misogyny greeted her at every turn: British men, she says, were the worst, closely followed